Buffy writes a journal article.

You’ll sometimes hear historians bemoaning the state of professional scholarship, saying there’s nothing interesting in the new issues of our journals and everyone’s fixated on trivia to the exclusion of important questions. And I like a good jeremiad as well as anyone. But I thought I’d begin a series of posts on journal articles that are interesting and nontrivial. (We’ll see how long it lasts.)

Link here, for those who can access it.
Okay, Jeremiahs will point out that I’ve begun with a bit of a cheat, because after all historiographical essays tend inherently to be a bit more interesting. But hush, Jeremiahs.

THE NONTRIVIAL QUESTIONS RAISED

What and when was the Civil Rights movement? Secondarily, does the South deserve its distinctive place in US history?

DISCUSSION

As any historian will tell you, when you look begs the question of what you’re looking at; periodization is substance. If you aren’t a professional historian and you don’t Google it, I guess you have an idea the Civil Rights Movement lasted from sometime in the middle 1950s to sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Indeed, as Cha-Jua and Lang point out here, in the earliest phase of history-writing on the Civil Rights Movement, that’s how historians described it—as roughly contemporary with the national career of Martin Luther King, Jr.

But gradually, historians came to appreciate the complexity of the Civil Rights Movement (CRM). It wasn’t just King or even a national movement at all, but a collection of local movements. Nor was it limited to the narrowly legalistic goals that the phrase “civil rights” implies, nor to the tactics of nonviolent protest and moral suasion we associate with the peak of theKingyears. Rather, militant and even armed protest had a long history in struggles for black freedom—which, some scholars came to think, was a better phrase than “civil rights” for what you could now see as a long movement spanning, well, the whole of American history—even predating the US itself.

This matters. If the Civil Rights Movement was only about peak King, it’s about specific legal claims and entailed specific limited tactics. If not—well, history’s much more complicated and maybe less pretty.

Now, you may say, the long version of the movement sounds right—after all, African Americans have been struggling for their liberation for as long as they have been enslaved or discriminated against. Which is true, and Cha-Jua and Lang remark it: they concede the “corrective” nature of much of the historiography discussed, and they think newer historians of the movement are right to “spotlight the ideological and tactical heterogeneity of the CRM”.

Nevertheless! Once you have something that’s always and everywhere true, you have nothing. Or nothing that explains anything useful, anyway. It’s like oxygen in the atmosphere—necessary to the story, but not very interesting at any given point. (Yes, Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson both required oxygen to survive, and if either had died of suffocation, you might have an interesting point noting it. But since they didn’t, let’s move on.) This is why Cha-Jua and Lang call the idea of a “long movement” a vampire—it’s an “ahistorical” concept. They quote Adam Fairclough on historians who emphasize too much continuity: “in stressing history’s ‘seamless web,’ they turn history into a homogenized mush”.

Historians of the “long movement” also tend, Cha-Jua and Lang note, to minimize distinctions between South and North (which normally includes the West, in these discussions). After all, all regions of the country had discrimination, and often the de facto was in effect and intent awfully similar to the de jure flavor. And, where you had discrimination you had resistance. All true. But also, a point you can carry too far. (One nervous graduate student who is writing about southern history said to me, “But then X [a rising young historian at a top department] told me there isn’t any such thing as southern history! So I didn’t know what to think.” Now look. As a tenured historian talking to dissertating graduate students, you might feel tempted to make grand historical pronouncements. But you probably shouldn’t make them in a way that stops the graduate students from finishing their work.)

Perhaps more important, blurring the discrimination between South and North makes African Americans who left the South in droves look pretty strange. Or, as Cha-Jua and Lang put it,

To ignore or minimize these fundamental differences is to question the wisdom of millions of African Americans who fled or were driven out of areas like the “American Congo” for Chicago’s Bronzeville and other northern black communities…. How else does one make sense of the South’s conflicted place in the popular memory of generations of African Americans? How does one interpret the circumstances surrounding the murder of Emmett Till, without accounting for his unfamiliarity with southern racial etiquette? One may also consider the enactment of local fair employment practice laws in the 1940s and 1950s. Although they were limited and easily subverted, they nonetheless represented reforms achieved largely in the North. Expunging the differences between North and South not only disfigures the past, but also does a disservice to the activists who clearly recognized those differences. The fact that Mississippi was widely considered “the belly of the beast” of southern white racism was no figment of northern journalists’ imagination.

Which is not to say there weren’t non-racial reasons to leave the South, nor to deny racism in the North, nor to minimize the struggle to eliminate it—but these regional distinctions are not mere hair-splitting and logic chopping; just because it is hard to draw the precise boundary between North and South doesn’t mean that at some point the line hasn’t clearly been crossed. (People with eyes can see the South well before they get to Biloxi.)

Cha-Jua and Lang are perhaps most intriguing when they discuss where the “long movement” comes from—in no small part from the attempt to “critique … conservatives’ more recent effort to rewrite history, reposition themselves as supporters of the CRM, and reduce the CRM to a struggle against prejudice and for the creation of a ‘colorblind society.'” Which is the right thing to do, because the conservative version of the CRM is pretty un-historical in itself. But you can carry good intentions too far, they note.

Their conclusion is either bracingly commonsensical or frustratingly obvious: “We must move beyond asserting the obvious: that African Americans have acted in their own interests. We should instead consider how they have understood and defined their interests, as well as the historical particularities of their actions.” But whichever it is, the article is both interesting and addresses a nontrivial question.

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Would it be fair to say that this kind of systole/diastole or Carnot cycle of narrowing and broadening of scope is inherent to history? Or does that overgeneralize the specifics of the article in hand?

Vance, certainly that question is beyond the scope of this article, but I think there’s merit in it. I mean, you’re touching on the classic distinction between hedgehogs and foxes, or lumpers and splitters, right?

I also really loved the parenthetical about not making sweeping statements to anxious grad students that imply that their entire projects are worthless. For that alone, you should be inducted into the grad student advisor hall of fame.

Slightly more seriously: I don’t buy the claim that when something is everywhere, it’s nowhere. This is surely only true of a certain kind of being everywhere—the kind where the thing which is said in general to be everywhere is also everywhere the same in particular. (Needing oxygen is like this; it doesn’t vary locally.) But if something is present everywhere but variously instantiated, then, while you have to look to the local instantiations to get explanatory power in the particular case, you haven’t made the thing everywhere present vanish—and it’s interesting to know that it is everywhere present, even if variously instantiated.

Yes, but ben, historians like to explain events. If x is always true, then it doesn’t explain an event. It might be necessary, but not sufficient, yes?

Historians also like to tell stories. If your story is “there was always x,” it’s a boring story.

Maybe more usefully, if x is an always-present force but only occasionally effective, then we might want to think about what makes it effective in particular circumstances. Is it like seismic pressure, which is more or less always the same, but sometimes spectacularly breaks loose? Or is it more varied?

Fantastic feature: I want to do more of that, but so far all I’ve really done is conference blogging.

That said, I feel like there’s a kind of excluded middle in this argument. As Emmanuele Le Roy Ladurie said, “But in the long run, even in the more esoteric branches of history, it must surely be the case that there will always come a moment when the historian, having worked out a solid conceptual basis, will need to start counting: to record frequencies, significant repetitions, or percentages.”

That resistance exists in most eras does not change the fact that there is a movement in the 50s and 60s which engages more people and has more effect than anything which came before. That civil rights arguments are rehearsed in age after age doesn’t change the fact that the age of mass radio and television brings those arguments to more people than ever before. (As Pete Seeger said, any time you bring people together, you’re practicing politics.) That racism exists in both North and South (and East and West, etc.) doesn’t change the fact that it was and is enacted differently in quantity and method and effect in different places and some may well be worse than others.

The “long movement” argument also seems to be based on a kind of falacious averaging: if there are peaks of resistance here and there, there must be a general level of resistance all over. In Japanese history, we’ve had a similar problem with marxist historiography’s focus on peasant uprisings and resistance producing an image of rural society that was much more conflicted than seems justified by the non-uprising sources.

But you might also wonder why it was always present, and tell a story about how when one local manifestation waned another rose up, about what (possible identical) role the different manifestations serve, and whatnot. It’s true that none of that would explain a particular event (not even the particular event of one manifestation’s being succeeded by another), but they are also interesting things whose stories demand! to be told.

I mean, I don’t disagree with the principle that the always-present x doesn’t explain the particular y in the way you (reasonably) want explanations to run. But that doesn’t mean the investigation of such things as such is without interest.

Well, I don’t count, since I’m [not — Ed.] a historian, but I guess I’d-a-said, had someone asked, that there were many movements concerned with civil rights of various kinds, but there was also a “Civil Rights Era,” conventionally used to designate a period when concern for civil rights (especially but not exclusively for African-Americans) not only became prominent in education, culture, literature, etc. in society at large, but also gained the attention of the federal government, and I guess I’d have said that it was late 1940s to the early 1970s. But I wouldn’t want to have to defend that chroology.

Hah, that did not occur to me. My thinking is, historiographical essays force you to really make an explicit case, where in non-historiographical essays you can sometimes get away with, well, this thing is interesting in itself, isn’t it?

I think it depends on the kind of historiography. There’s addressing major interpretations of large events known to most people, historian or not, which is probably at least as interesting as regular history to most people, and then there’s characterizing what the literature has said on a particular point of interest to those in that particular field, which is likely to be less interesting to lots of people. Actual use of the word “historiography” probably makes people think you’re going to do the latter, even when you’re not.

This is fantastic–thanks so much, and please make this series last! Since you already hint at it, how about a take on the strength/endurance of sectional or regional histories? I’d love to be pointed to interesting and relevant recent work on that.

There’s also the question of why you’re looking. If Cha-Jua and Lang are right, and the framing of the Long CRM aims in part to “critique … conservatives’ more recent effort to rewrite history,” then we have at least two contending approaches motivated by (among other things) an a priori view of the larger context, whether that’s US history, African-American history, history of popular movements or whatever. If you start from the assumption that popular resistance to injustice is always a good thing, you’ll be inclined to look for it outside the temporal or spatial limits that conventional historiography imposes on it; if on the other hand you start from the assumptions that racism was “only” a matter of Jim Crow laws and denial of voting rights, and that only non-violent tactics are warranted in a democratic state like the US, you’ll try to frame the CRM purely as non-violent opposition to those specific kinds of injustice. Is there such a thing as Southern history? Is there such a region as “the South?” The answers depend at least partly on why you want to know, don’t they?

Thanks for this post. Its a great analysis of a compelling historiographic question. Its good to see EotAW get back to meat and potatoes history instead of bogged down in critiques of wingnuttery. Nice work.

Well, this gracefully elides such matters as the prominent Abolitionists who had no intention whatever of equality for black people. To the extent that we’re misled by emotional understandings of regions. we’re masking equally real historical events in different dimensions.

There are, for example, reasons the South remained relatively underdeveloped until subsidized by federal dollars, and remains poorer today. Perhaps the most striking regional characteristic is the degree to which Southerners preferred to remain poor if that would defend their prejudices.

Failing to weight your historical view with the long past may result in you climbing what seems to be a mountain, but appears to others to be just a small rise.

Thanks for this! I just read the linked article and will definitely make use of it in future. (In fact, I’m meeting in 15 minutes with some students prepping for their comprehensive exams in U.S. history, and i will bring it up.) I regularly teach with Jacquelyn Hall’s “Long Civil Rights Movement” article, which converted me to the Long Movement idea, and with Peniel Joseph’s great book on black power, so it’s very interesting to see the pendulum swinging back the other way.

My specific side question: what do you (or anyone else reading this) think of the vampire metaphor? It seems like a weird way to frame this argument. I like vampires as much as the next guy, but other than giving Eric a cute title for his post, does invoking vampires add anything to the argument in the article?

As you can see in the article, the purpose is to make reference to something undying, immune to historical change. Vampires could be said to have that attribute but arguably, that’s not their distinct defining attribute. So maybe not the best metaphor.

Another great thing about this article is that I’ve already seen that it has real “legs” outside the academy. It was discussed at a symposium I went to a couple weeks ago at the National Archives here — in a discussion among historians, archivists, and just plain public folks who have an interest in the Movement. And the questions that the article raises have been raging during the design process of the civil rights center they are building here in Atlanta. Anyhow, great idea for a post.